Classic Video Game Trivia
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This classic video game trivia quiz has 95 free questions with answers and covers the arcade golden age and the console eras that followed it, from Computer Space in 1971 to GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64. Forty-two questions take in Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey lawsuit, Space Invaders' speeding aliens, the ghosts of Pac-Man and the 256th-level kill screen, Donkey Kong and the birth of Mario, Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, the Atari 2600, E.T. in the New Mexico landfill and the 1983 crash, the NES and R.O.B., Zelda's battery save, the Konami Code, the Game Boy, Sonic versus Mario, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat and the birth of the ESRB, Doom's shareware model and Myst's decade-long PC sales record. Easy questions ask what the four Pac-Man ghosts are called and which company made Pong; hard ones want the coder who hid the first Easter egg in Adventure, the Soviet computer Tetris was written on and how many cabinets Defender sold. Retro gamers, this is your quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the games, consoles and designers, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what kind of venue did Atari test its first Pong prototype in 1972?
A tavern
A tavern: at Andy Capp's in Sunnyvale, California, the owner reported the test machine broken, but its coin box was simply overflowing with quarters.
Q 02Pong's concept was borrowed from a ping-pong game on which console, prompting a patent lawsuit?
Magnavox Odyssey
The Magnavox Odyssey, built from Ralph Baer's 'Brown Box' prototype, went on sale in September 1972 with a table-tennis game; Magnavox later sued over Pong, and Atari settled out of court.
Q 03What was the first commercially available arcade video game, released in 1971?
Computer Space
Computer Space, built by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney from the mainframe game Spacewar!, was sold by Nutting Associates in fibreglass cabinets; roughly 1,300 to 1,500 were made.
Q 04How did the first home console, released in 1972, add colour and scenery to its games?
Plastic screen overlays
Plastic screen overlays did the job: the console could draw only white squares and a line, so each game shipped with a translucent sheet to cling to the TV.
Q 05What was Pac-Man's original title in Japan?
Puck Man
Puck Man, a name designer Toru Iwatani traces to the Japanese 'paku-paku' for munching, was on Namco's 1980 Japanese cabinets; it was renamed for America for fear vandals would turn the P into an F.
Q 06Which ghost replaced Clyde as the orange member of the quartet in Ms. Pac-Man?
Sue
Sue is the orange ghost in Ms. Pac-Man, taking over from Clyde; when later games put the two side by side, she was recoloured purple.
Q 07Which stage of Pac-Man is impossible to complete because of an integer overflow?
Level 256
Level 256 is the famous kill screen: an integer overflow scrambles the right half of the maze into symbols, leaving too few dots to clear the board.
Q 08Donkey Kong was created in 1981 to reuse unsold cabinets from which failed Nintendo arcade game?
Radar Scope
Radar Scope had flopped in America, leaving about 2,000 unsold cabinets in a warehouse; Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi handed the conversion job to first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto.
Q 09By what name was Mario known in the English instructions for the original Donkey Kong arcade game?
Jumpman
Jumpman was the hero's name in the 1981 arcade game's instructions; Nintendo of America staff renamed him Mario after their warehouse landlord, Mario Segale, and the name stuck.
Q 10On which computer did Alexey Pajitnov first program his falling-blocks puzzle game?
Elektronika 60
Elektronika 60, a Soviet clone of the PDP-11 at the Academy of Sciences computing centre in Moscow, was where Pajitnov wrote the original in Pascal; it had no graphics, so he drew the blocks with brackets.
Q 11Which entrepreneur went to Moscow in 1989 and won the handheld rights to Alexey Pajitnov's puzzle game?
Henk Rogers
Henk Rogers turned up uninvited at Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG), the state body that licensed Soviet software, and persuaded its managers to deal with him directly.
Q 12What was the console later known as the 2600 called when it launched in September 1977?
Atari Video Computer System
Atari Video Computer System, or VCS, was the launch name; Stella had been its development codename, and the console was renamed the Atari 2600 in November 1982 after its model number CX2600.
Q 13Which arcade conversion in 1980 became the Atari 2600's first killer app?
Space Invaders
Q 21How much time does Pitfall Harry get to hunt for treasure in Pitfall!?
20 minutes
20 minutes is the limit: a timer counts down from 20:00 while Harry hunts 32 treasures across 255 screens; David Crane built the 1982 Activision game around a running-man animation he had made first.
Q 22What was the NES called in Japan, where it launched in July 1983?
Famicom
Famicom, short for Family Computer, launched in Japan on 15 July 1983; Masayuki Uemura led its design, and the redesigned NES version went on to revive the American market after the 1983 crash.
Q 23Which NES accessory came bundled with early sets to win over wary retailers?
R.O.B.
R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, was a toy robot packed into the 1985 Deluxe Set so Nintendo could pitch the NES as a toy to shops burned by the video game crash.
Space Invaders reached the Atari 2600 in 1980 and became its first killer app: sales of the console quadrupled as people bought it just to play the arcade hit at home.
Q 14Roughly how long did Howard Scott Warshaw get to design and program E.T. for the Atari 2600?
Five weeks
Five weeks, give or take a few days: the film licence was settled in late July 1982 and the code had to be finished by 1 September to reach shops for Christmas.
Q 15In which town's landfill were unsold E.T. cartridges confirmed buried when diggers investigated in 2014?
Alamogordo, New Mexico
Alamogordo, New Mexico: in April 2014 a documentary crew excavated the town landfill and unearthed E.T. and other cartridges dumped there in September 1983, confirming a story long dismissed as urban legend.
Q 16Which Atari 2600 game contains the first widely known video game Easter egg?
Adventure
Adventure (1980) hides a secret room displaying 'Created by Warren Robinett'; he planted it because the company refused to credit programmers, and Ready Player One's climax is built around it.
Q 17In the text game Zork, what eats players who wander in the dark without a light?
A grue
A grue, its name taken by Dave Lebling from Jack Vance's fiction, eats anyone who moves about in the dark; it replaced the pits of early versions after his character fell into one in an attic.
Q 18Which 1981 Williams shooter, Eugene Jarvis's first video game, became the company's best-selling arcade game?
Defender
Defender sold more than 55,000 cabinets, a Williams record, even though Eugene Jarvis had only programmed pinball machines before and players found it punishingly hard.
Q 19Which 1981 Atari arcade game, co-designed by Dona Bailey, was one of the first widely played by women?
Centipede
Centipede, co-designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg and released in 1981, used a trackball to shoot a centipede winding through a mushroom field; its pastel look and Bailey's involvement drew an unusually large female following.
Q 20Which early-1980s arcade game has the player protect six cities?
Missile Command
Missile Command (1980) has the player roll a trackball to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles; designer Dave Theurer had nightmares about being bombed while he was making it.
Q 24Steve Wozniak built the prototype hardware for which 1976 arcade game in under a week?
Breakout
Breakout was the job: Steve Jobs, then working for Nolan Bushnell, brought in his friend Wozniak, who designed a working prototype within days using far fewer chips than the company's engineers expected.
Q 25The Legend of Zelda's 1987 NES cartridge was among the first console games to save progress using what?
An internal battery
An internal battery kept the save alive: the game had launched in Japan on a rewritable disk add-on, so the cartridge version needed its own way to store progress.
Q 26Before Contra, the Konami Code first appeared in which NES game?
Gradius
Gradius, the 1986 NES port, was the first: programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto added the code to give himself a full power-up set while testing and forgot to remove it; Contra later made it famous with 30 lives.
Q 27Which game was bundled with the Game Boy in North America and Europe?
Tetris
Tetris came in the box when the Game Boy launched in North America and Europe; Nintendo chose the puzzle game over a Mario title to reach adults as well as children, and the cartridge sold about 35 million copies.
Q 28The original Game Boy's unlit screen showed four shades of which colour?
Green
Green, in four greyish shades: Nintendo turned down a colour screen and a backlight because both would drain the batteries, an edge that colour rivals never matched.
Q 29Which SNES feature let games fake 3D perspective, as in F-Zero and Mario Kart?
Mode 7
Mode 7 is a background mode of the SNES graphics hardware that can rotate and scale a single layer every scanline, producing the tilted racetracks of F-Zero (1990) and Super Mario Kart (1992); Super FX was a separate cartridge chip.
Q 30Sonic the Hedgehog was designed by Naoto Ohshima after he won what?
An internal Sega character contest
An internal Sega character contest in 1990 sought a mascot to rival Mario; Naoto Ohshima's spiky hedgehog won, programmer Yuji Naka built the game around it, and the developers renamed themselves Sonic Team.